Summer 2016 exhibitions

Emperor Charles IV 1316–2016
May 15–September 25, 2016
Waldstein Riding School

Curated by Jiří Fajt

While enjoying the last days of the exhibition Generosity. The Art of Giving, the National Gallery in Prague continues to celebrate its 220th Anniversary by staging yet another 2016 exhibition program highlight, Emperor Charles IV 1316–2016. This ambitious project marks the 700th anniversary of the birth of Charles IV, a unique figure of Europe’s political and cultural history. One of the most generous patrons, Charles IV was programmatically using arts and architecture to promote his imperial majesty. Devoid of distorting layers of ideological prejudice, the exhibition seeks to offer a multi-faceted portrait of the historical figure with both his positive and negative qualities.

Charles IV is presented against the kaleidoscopic background of a broad contemporary, cultural-historical 14th century context, including, among others, climatic changes, droughts and floods, poor harvests, famines, plague epidemics, Jewish pogroms or financial crises. The admirable prosperity of the arts and architecture of Charles IV are set in this historical context with conspicuous overlaps to the present. 

Zdenek Rykr and the Chocolate Factory
May 27–August 28, 2016
Trade Fair Palace

Curated by Vojtěch Lahoda

The work of Zdenek Rykr (1900–40), devoid of a single stylistic mode, is still somewhat neglected. Expressionist, realist and cubist, but also close in the spirit to neo-classicism, sensual realism, neo-fauvism, abstraction and surrealism, his output oscillates between modern art and advertising activity. In the period of 1921–39, he was designing packaging and publicity materials for the chocolate and confectionary company of Maršner-Orion, later just Orion. Rykr’s “invention” of the Orion chocolate star, as well as other graphic symbols today indelibly linked to the brand, all testify to the unique abilities of this skillful draughtsman and caricaturist. He participated also in the promotion of such companies as Škoda, Čedok and others. The exhibition presents Rykr’s work in its full breadth, blurring boundaries between high and low and between individual stylistic tendencies. In this way, the work of Zdenek Rykr continues to be topical today.

Cranach from All Sides
June 23, 2016–January 22, 2017
Sternberg Palace

Curated by Olga Kotková

The exhibition presents the German Renaissance painter and his circle by unique works from the collections of the National Gallery in Prague as well as by the results of research of experts from the Cranach Digital Archive Düsseldorf, led by Gunnar Heydenreich. The group of the Prague works linked with the artist’s name is heterogeneous, showing popular scenes such as The Old Fool, Christ and the Adulteress and The Original Sin (Adam and Eve). The research has revealed many yet unknown facts, such as information about the technological aspects of the production of the works and especially their copies. The exhibition presents the Cranach workshop as an ingeniously organized unit based on precise working methods.

Dreams and Reality. 30 Years of the Architecture Collection at the National Gallery in Prague
June 24–September 25, 2016
Trade Fair Palace

Curated by Radomíra Sedláková

The Architecture Collection was established at the National Gallery in Prague on February 2, 1986. Focused mainly on Czech architecture of the second half of the 20th century, it contains plans, models, photographs, negatives, drawings and graphic prints. The collection is introduced to the visitors from the very first purchases and it presents the principal figures, such as Václav Hilský, Věra and Vladimír Machonin, Jiří Kroha, Karel Prager, or Vlado Milunič, alongside with pivotal artworks, such as l’Unité d´habitation in Marseilles by Le Corbusier, the State Gallery on Letná by Josef Gočár, the Hotel International by František Jeřábek, the Czechoslovak Pavilion at Expo ‘58 in Brussels, or designs for the Czechoslovak Pavilion at Expo ‘92. 

Vanity Fair. Academy of Fine Arts Graduates 2016
June 24–August 3, 2016
Trade Fair Palace

Curated by Otto M. Urban 

Founded in 1799, AVU is the oldest art school in the Czech lands. Its founder, the Society of Patriotic Friends of the Arts, also laid the foundations for the National Gallery in Prague. The collaboration between AVU and the National Gallery is not only a result of this history but relates also to the large number of works by AVU graduates in the Gallery’s collection. Today, more than 300 AVU students work in 18 different studios. Around 40 students graduate each year, specializing in traditional sculpture and painting, drawing and printmaking and intermedia and conceptual art.

Introducing Nicole Morris & Miroslava Večeřová: Girlfriend
June 24–September 18, 2016
Trade Fair Palace

Introduced by Tereza Jindrova

The work of the two artists Nicole Morris (born 1986, lives and works in London) and Miroslava Večeřová (born 1985 in Prague) is characterized by a multi-layered nature and shares a number of common aspects—the way they employ video in combination with installations, objects and performances or the specific corporeality inherent in the visuality of their works. The videos that form the core of the multimedia presentation may be perceived as poems in the medium of the moving image—poems about touch, transformation, growing up, the sea, plaster, chalk, light, shade as well as many unnameable things.

Moving Image Department Fifth Chapter
The Economies of Time, Subverted
June 24–September 18, 2016
Trade Fair Palace

Adrian Paci, Adam Vačkář
Featuring Thomas Baumann, Josef Dabernig, Martin Kaltner & Liam Gillick

Curated by Adam Budak

A sense of perverted nostalgia haunts the cinematic narratives gathered in a polylogue of the fifth chapter of the Moving Image Department. After having fantasized a moving image as a vehicle of a collective voice, the following sequence concentrates on the economies of time—the transformative power, the image’s alchemic virtues, an image as a passage, a state in-between. Subversion is in the centre of this chapter; a reversed movement, and an unexpected twist, or the most banal operation. 

Poetry Passage #3
Silent Eternity
June 24–September 18, 2016
Trade Fair Palace

Bernadette Corporation, Katinka Bock

Curated by Adam Budak

After having examined poetry’s role as a paradigm-changing resource and poetry’s ability to produce sense, the third exhibition etude in the Poetry Passage series refers to Jacques Rancière’s elaboration of poetry in Mallarmé. The Politics of the Siren (1996). The French philosopher celebrates the poem as “the supreme consecration because it is the supreme artifice, replete with the ability to elevate the traces of writing on a white page ‘to the heights of the starry sky, the fan which identifies the movement of its folds with this doubling of the sensory, this play of appearing and disappearing which turns silent eternity into the space of a world.’” The Poetry Passage #3 twists definitions and approaches while offering a journey through the mani-folded pathways of poetry’s meaning and giving access to the language’s power to oscillate between the depth and the surface.